[ih] Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet -- Some Questions

[Vint Cerf]

this looks like conflates of a lot of stuff.

The ARPANET was motivated by resource sharing (see Larry Roberts and Barry
Wessler paper "On Resource Sharing"

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1477020

Licklider wrote extensively on the use of computers for non-numerical
purposes and was a strong supporter of Douglas Engelbart's work on
collaborative knowledge sharing.

The director of IPTO, Robert Taylor, was involved at one point, I think, in
the Vietnamese situation regarding casualty counts. see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scientist) but this
had nothing to do with ARPANET as far as I know.

I know nothing about the Cambridge Project but ARPANET was available for
anyone with permission from DoD to use it so if CAM was a DoD project it
might well have been authorized to use the ARPANET but the developers of
the ARPANET and its host protocols did not make any reference to a
"Cambridge Project" or "CAM" to me during my association with the ARPANET
project (1968-1982).

ARPANET was a general purpose computer communication network. It is a
distortion to conflate this communication system's development with the
various projects that made use of its facilities. A secured capability was
developed for use on the ARPANET by BBN (the developer of the ARPANET IMPs)
and presumably was used to communicate classified information over the
network.



On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 5:47 PM, Eric Gade <eric.gade at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello list members,
>
> Please excuse the length of this email.
>
> I am in the process of writing a review of Yasha Levine's new history of
> the Internet, "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the
> Internet." His overall thesis is that the development of the Internet has,
> from the beginning, grown from "counterinsurgency" and surveillance
> operations, and that these aspects have not been adequately chronicled in
> other histories. Many of his claims about the early ARPA work I have not
> encountered before, and I imagine that some would find them provocative.
>
> I'm hoping there are members of this list with knowledge about these
> claims who can help me clarify a few points:
>
>
>    1. Levine asserts that there was some overlap or relationship between
>    William Godel's Project Agile and work conducted by the ARPA Command and
>    Control division under Licklider. He pulls a lot from Sharon Weinberger's
>    recent book ("The Imagineers of War") in discussing both Godel and the
>    potential connection. He writes, "[Licklider's] work at ARPA was part of
>    the military's larger counterinsurgency efforts and directly overlapped
>    with William Godel's Project Agile." (52). In making this statement he
>    actually cites Weinberger's prologue, in which she says "Godel personally
>    signed off on the first computer-networking study, giving it money from his
>    Vietnam budget." It appears Weinberger is herself citing this document: (
>    https://archivesdeclassification.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/
>    arpa-order-internet.pdf
>    <https://archivesdeclassification.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/arpa-order-internet.pdf>).
>    It is a part of a series that may still be classified (I have the NDC
>    looking into it). My question about this is: was there really any kind of
>    working relationship? What does this transfer of funds represent? And
>    perhaps more broadly: to what extent was ARPA C&C/IPTO involved in
>    counterinsurgency data collection and processing?
>    2. A large section of the early history in this book deals with the
>    Cambridge Project (aka Project CAM) at MIT and controversy surrounding it
>    at the time. I am awaiting a copy of the original proposal from MIT (it
>    might not come in before deadline; should anyone on this list have a copy
>    I'd really appreciate it). Levine asserts that the project "would directly
>    aid the agency's counterinsurgency mission." He claims that the work of the
>    project "could be accessed from any computer with an ARPANET connection"
>    (68) and that "It was a kind of stripped down 1960s version of Palantir,
>    the powerful data mining, surveillance, and prediction software the
>    military and intelligence planners use today." He goes on: "the project was
>    customized to the military's needs, with particular focus on fighting
>    insurgencies and rolling back communism [...] It was clear that the
>    Cambridge Project wasn't just a tool for research, it was a
>    counterinsurgency technology." (68-69)
>
>    Is that not an accurate description of the proposal? Were any members
>    on this list involved in this research? If so, are these characterizations
>    accurate to your mind?
>    3. There is yet another section where Levine finds some reporting from
>    the early 70s, where NBC News' Rowan Ford conducted a 4 month investigation
>    and found evidence that intelligence files about American anti-war
>    protestors and others had been transferred, perhaps stored, and perhaps
>    processed somehow, over the ARPANET and linked host machines. His report
>    was entered into the Congressional Record as a part of Tunney's hearings in
>    1975:
>    https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015078638619;
>    view=1up;seq=7
>
>    The claim is that these files might have been a part of previous CONUS
>    intel that, in 1972, the Army was ordered to delete. One of the claims in
>    the report is that such files were transferred via the ARPANET to MIT for
>    some reason. Ford had 4 sources for this story who had knowledge of the
>    incident; only one, Richard Ferguson (who apparently was fired from MIT for
>    this disclosure), gave information publicly.
>
>    Does anyone on this list have knowledge of this incident, and/or
>    whether or not the ARPANET/ARPA IPTO was used to move around, eventually
>    store, or otherwise process these kinds of dossiers?
>
>
> These are all the questions I have for now. Thanks for taking the time to
> read.
>
> --
> Eric
>
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>
>


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